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Baked Sole

Baked Sole is a fish dish baked with butter, lemon, stock, and a mushroom‑parsley‑escalot sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Baked Sole

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the black skin from the sole, scrape the other side, remove the gills, cut off the fins, clean it, and wipe it with a clean cloth.

  2. Make an incision on each side down the back to the bone.

  3. Butter an oval gratin pan well and lay the sole in it.

  4. Season the sole with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and add the stock or water.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake the sole in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 15 to 20 minutes.

  2. In a small saucepan, melt 1 oz of butter and stir in the flour for 2 to 3 minutes.

  3. Add 2 cups of water or stock to the saucepan and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Pour the cooking liquid from the sole into the sauce.

  5. Add another ounce of butter and the minced herbs, which should be blanched, to the sauce.

  6. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Serve

  1. Place the baked sole on a dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the sauce and keeps the fish moist while it bakes.
Flour
Cooked with butter, it thickens the sauce so it coats the fish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mild fish and sauce.
Button mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux. Stirring the flour in butter for 2 to 3 minutes cooks out its raw starch taste and lets it thicken the sauce evenly. Adding the liquid too fast or without enough stirring can leave lumps.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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